Month: September 2010

An important part of being productive is acknowledging the effects of your work. You need a time to enjoy the progress you’ve made or the number of tasks you’ve completed. To put it simply you need to celebrate your success from time to time.

Enjoying your success is not about showing off how much stuff have you completed and how productive you are. It’s about noticing the progress and change that you’ve made by completing those actions.

I think many times we are selling ourselves short by focusing on all the outstanding items. This does not serves us well it creates more negativity and does not improve our wellbeing. As success breeds success taking time to look at your successes makes it easier to repeat them. You can see your self that you can do it and what are you capable of.

Your @Celebrate list. If your are using any electronic system to manage tasks creating ‘Celebrate’ list is very easy. In Outlook you can create a new view. Remember the Milk (my current tool) allows you to set up a smart lists where you can define the task to be displayed. Set them to show you tasks completed in last seven days.

If you prefer paper perhaps you could enjoy the number of tasks that have been crossed off.

Enjoy your success weekly. Take couple minutes on Friday and review your list. See how many tasks have you completed. You might spot some important projects or things that were long overdue and they are now done.

Get your self a treat like a good coffee or something you like and use this opportunity to enjoy it while reflecting on the stuff you have accomplished. I’m pretty sure this will help you finish work week on a positive note and set you up for good weekend.

Reading Mattew Cornell’s blog provides you with a lot of good tips, observations, ideas. I’ve been reading his blog for 2 years and absolutely enjoyed it. Some time ago he posted his view on applying Pareto’s rule 80/20 rule to GTD he discusses possibility of removing most of the acton lists and putting them on the calendar. I think this is great idea as it can increase your rate of completed actions especially if you take their importance and value into account. However I wouldn’t agree with this approach in case of project list.

I see the project list as most important list which helps making progress in our life. Next actions show the steps we need to take, projects show the direction we going to. As Allen says project list is a list of outcomes that require more than one step to complete. This is wide approach and can accommodate large spectrum of goals. It can range from replace tyres and fund new company. Obviously both bear different importance and value but both require more than two steps to complete.

In order to maintain progress on things you’re committed to you need to see them. Potentially list of project should be the most frequently reviewed list as it would tell us if we are on target or drifting away.

As much as putting things on a calendar helps to plan the doing and increases accountability it limits your options to view full situation. Looking at your weekly calendar may indicate that there is x amount of projects to be completed but you could miss the commitments that are due down the line or don’t have any specific end date.

Project list in my view should provide you answer to following question: "Can I commit to a new project or can I take on that new opportunity?" This is critical in terms of moving current obligations forward. Without being able to refer to your project list as whole you won’t be able to correctly asses your situation and you might commit to something that you can’t complete. On the flip side you can spot and use upcoming opportunity because you will be able to see that it brings more value than any of your current projects.

I’m finding that mind maps are becoming one of the pillars in my personal productivity system. I use them very, very often. I have a shortcut on my task bar to launch Freeplane – my current mind mapping program of choice. I even set up a special key combinations in ActiveWords application to launch my most important mind maps. I’m literally just two clicks away from almost any mind map on my computer. In addition on the go if I want to draw a quick map I can do this on the Android phone thanks to ThinkingSpace application.

If you seen some examples of mind mapping but you’re still not sure if it will do the job. Perhaps you’re looking for other ways to leverage the power of mind mapping. If that’s the case you might be interested in below blog post by Chuck Frey of Mindmappingblog.com.

As a result, a savvy businesspeople are utilizing this type of productivity software for an amazing number of applications, including these: